Case Studies – Library of Professional Coachinghttps://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com
Coaching Articles and ResourcesWed, 13 Dec 2017 20:45:17 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.152727354Team Coaching: Are We Aiming High Enough?https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/team-coaching-are-we-aiming-high-enough/
https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/team-coaching-are-we-aiming-high-enough/#respondMon, 15 May 2017 20:27:46 +0000http://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/?p=12371What makes high functioning teams? This a fundamental question when it comes to coaching teams. To answer this, we first need to recognize what we are dealing with at a very basic level: human beings who have come together from varied walks of life to form a relationship system. A system of interacting and interconnected experiences, families of origin, unique skills, hopes and dreams.

Significant inherent complexity is at play and all in one place—the team. It is no surprise then that high functioning teams tend to be the exception to the norm. So, what enables a high functioning team? That very much depends on what you are aiming for and the standards by which you judge it.

High Functioning Teams Defined

This article proposes that a high functioning team is one that allows its members to connect with their calling in working towards a common purpose. One that embraces the inherent creativity and uniqueness that defines what it means to be human. One that acknowledges the complexity that is created by different individuals coming together (and moving apart) over time.

Out of the above will naturally emerge all the things that are commonly desired in teams: collaboration, innovation, agility and performance.

On the morning of 25 October 1415 (Feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian), shortly before the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V made a brief speech to the English army under his command, emphasizing the justness of his claim to the French throne and harking back to the memory of previous defeats the English kings had inflicted on the French:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
Redemption
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

In the face of overwhelming odds, Henry’s army defeated the French and the battle was won. Henry’s troops before the battle were weary, hungry, tired and at the point of giving up. How could such a feat be accomplished in the face of such odds? Was it just about the speech he gave? His speech definitely had an impact, so what could this be? This article analyzes this speech and attempts to uncover the impact of the speech and what it could mean for us today.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost

THE CAPACITY TO LEAD DEPENDS ON MENTAL AND MORAL QUALITIES

All prevailing forms of governance in democracies and non-democracies are increasingly ‘dead ends’…, radical [re]design of governance is required, otherwise increasing social costs, ever threatening failures, even to existence are unavoidable… At best, markets are well-suited for delivery service functions. They are not suited for being in charge of and shaping critical future choices. Yechezkel Dror

The conclusion, stated unequivocally, is that good ideas and new methods will make no difference. “The changes called for are fully a matter of the mental and moral qualities that distinguish a leader of character.”

]]>https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/publicgovernment-sector/in-search-of-islands-of-sanity/feed/011807Coordinated Coaching Increases Trust within Organizations; Accountability as a Trust-Building Frameworkhttps://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/coordinated-coaching-increases-trust-within-organizations-accountability-as-a-trust-building-framework/
https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/coordinated-coaching-increases-trust-within-organizations-accountability-as-a-trust-building-framework/#respondFri, 27 Jan 2017 20:45:31 +0000http://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/?p=11711[Note: Portions of this case study were published, with some editing, in Forbes. We believe that you, as a professional coach or consumer of coaching services, will find this fuller account of an exceptional team-based coaching process to be of even greater value—though the publication of a fragment of this case study in a widely read and highly-regarded publication such as Forbes speaks convincingly to the importance and credibility of this case study. You will also note that several additional comments (in italics) have been provided by another member of the coaching team (Team Coach), providing even greater opportunity for the reader to derive insights and inspiration from this case study.]

If you find accountability, collaboration, and communication to be issues in your organization, the underlying cause may be a culture of distrust. Trust is the missing ingredient for true employee engagement within an organization. According to Tolero Solutions, 45% of employees say lack of trust in leadership is the biggest issue impacting work performance.

To me, trust is sort of a symptom of whether or not employee engagement exists,” said Bob Tobias, director of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at The American University. “It’s not possible… to have employee engagement without trust.

Trust allows employees and management to resolve disagreements, have lower turnover rates, take smarter risks, contribute innovative ideas, and more. All of which can impact a company’s growth and bottom line.

Trust can be fragile. Once broken, it can create breakdowns in communication, disgruntled emotions, and can really slow down projects and therefore results within an organization. A company without trust cannot successfully collaborate when the players may not be on civil speaking terms.

Distrust can be vile in nature. Once established, it can grow quickly within an organization, instantly infecting new employees as they assimilate into a culture devoid of trust. The problem with trust is that is actually easier to destroy than it is to maintain.

Traditional application of one to one coaching can be effective on a small scale within companies, but what do you do when distrust has become entrenched throughout an entire organization? 1:1 coaching can become cost prohibitive when 60 or more people need it, and there is the logistical issue of how you would coordinate the effectiveness and consistency of that many individual coaches, especially if they are external to your organization.

I believe most people in the coaching community, recognizing the great value in coaching, would agree that there is a great need for coaching in schools. And while coaching has reached the levels of administrators working with teachers, it does not appear to have a foothold in the classroom–yet. Happily, I’m beginning to see the word “coach” show up in education literature when speaking of teachers working with students. Coaching is difficult to define as the coaching literature proves, so one has to wonder, what coaching looks like in education, specifically in the classroom. Is the word coaching another way to define teaching, or is it meant to evoke a different set of skills? Or does coaching in the classroom pattern that of coaching a sport? While there is not a clear cut definition of coaching, it is safe to say that at the heart of coaching is the desire to help people live lives of well-being and purpose, expressing their true potential. This desire is also at the heart of great teaching and for many, the reason to go into teaching.

I believe coaching adolescents and teens in the broader spectrum of personal growth and creativity are areas that will benefit them in making important life decisions–more than solely coaching in a particular subject. Through self-awareness, we assist students in becoming self observers with the goal of better knowing and understanding themselves. This is far more satisfying for those teachers who want to make a difference in students’ lives and reaches beyond the subject area to be taught. Business leaders are calling for more creativity and innovation in the workforce, what better way to prepare students than to have them learn to express their personal creativity?

Coaching students and young people is vastly different than coaching adults in a business or professional setting. For one thing, coaching in the classroom lends itself to group coaching, with coachable moments of individual students interspersed, unlike the typical individual coaching in a coach-client relationship. And of course, adolescents and teens are at a different stage of growth and development than adults. They struggle with being unique on one hand and wanting to conform on the other. That along with changing feelings, hormones, and bodies, make this time especially exciting and frightening all at once. Many students feel the stress of having to make decisions about their future that they are not ready or not confident enough to make. So, how do we best begin coaching students in the classroom and what should it look like?

The recent College of Policing leadership review prioritises a move away from ‘heroic leadership’ to a more team-based and engaging approach. We propose that the metaphor of host leadership – leading as host rather than a hero – offers a useful way forwards, being both richly dimensional and highly practical.

The leadership review

The College of Policing Leadership Review takes a wide-ranging look at leadership throughout the police forces of the UK. It contains 10 key points for progress. The first of these is about leadership culture – in particular the desirability of moving on from a heroic leader position. For example, section 5.2 says:

We heard that in a command orientated world there is a tendency to shift towards the ‘heroic’ model of leadership in which an individual is the figurehead and followers are there to ensure the leader’s will is carried out. We advocate more emphasis on a model in which leaders are there to ensure the success of their teams.

Taking command remains an essential part of the leadership repertoire, but the overuse of command as a leadership style risks disempowering those who are being commanded. Overuse poses an obstacle to the culture of candour and challenge that is necessary to succeed in the future context and it diminishes the qualities of personal resilience, creativity and risk taking that helps teams to develop in the good times and survive in the bad.

The need to be able to take command in an authoritative way is clear – the wider question is whether that is always the best thing to do, and how this option can sit within a wider coherent set of leadership behaviours.

The importance of command – in the right setting

Picture the scene… a road traffic accident has just happened, there are injured parties, damaged vehicles, a blocked road, shock and panic is setting in. The police officer (constable?) arriving on the scene needs to be able to instantly take control, to convey authority, and to give everyone confidence that things are being handled. They must ensure that priorities are dealt with, the scene is protected and secured if necessary, that casualties are given priority and that things are done as quickly as possible to get things moving again. This is a vital part of every officer’s training, and rightly so.

]]>https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/publicgovernment-sector/hero-to-host-developing-police-leadership-in-the-21st-century/feed/09865Case Study: A Winning Strategyhttps://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/case-study-a-winning-strategy/
https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/case-study-a-winning-strategy/#respondFri, 15 May 2015 18:21:54 +0000http://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/?p=8475Over the last two decades, team coaching has emerged as an extension of Executive Coaching, empowering leaders to work with their teams in new ways and transform team-building into culture-building. Since 2012, the field sales force for Sanofi’s North American Pharmaceutical division has been reaping the benefits of team coaching delivered via The Pyramid Resource Group’s proprietary model, Team Advantage: The Complete Coaching Process for Team Transformation.

A Challenging Climate

In late 2011, North American Pharmaceuticals, Sanofi employed 5,000 people and was generating annual revenue of roughly $10 billion USD. Anne Whitaker had just been named the division’s president at a time when the organization as a whole faced great challenges. Some of Sanofi’s best-selling drugs were just months away from going off patent, while other products faced stiff generic competition. Employees were weary from recent mergers, ongoing restructuring, and attempts to integrate cultures and processes while the company implemented necessary but painful cost-containment measures. Their anxiety was quantified by a disheartening employee engagement index of 61.6 percent.

Although Anne was concerned about market share and profit, she also recognized that sustainable improvement and innovation starts with employees who find meaning and satisfaction in their jobs and take pride in their company. She brought in The Pyramid Resource Group to coach a select cadre of first-line leaders tasked with seeding change leadership capabilities and coaching teams as Sanofi prepared to shift to a more patient-focused sales model.

Accelerating Change

Pyramid’s Team Advantage model is a 16-week process that fast-tracks team cohesiveness and performance by asking members to create a game plan worthy of their time and energy. It has the built-in measures of a game with business goal attainment and encourages creativity and play.

]]>https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/team-coaching/case-study-a-winning-strategy/feed/08475The Book Shelf: Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist (2010)https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/sustainability/the-book-shelf-matt-ridley-the-rational-optimist-2010/
https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/sustainability/the-book-shelf-matt-ridley-the-rational-optimist-2010/#respondTue, 14 Apr 2015 21:41:24 +0000http://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/?p=8299The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley is one of the books that I greater admire and from which I have extracted many insights as a professional coach. I am not alone in expressing enthusiasm for this book — it has received many rave reviews. In this brief review of The Rational Optimist we want to highlight several key points, indicate where other authors we admire have offered a similar perspective–and most importantly suggest several ways in which Ridley’s analysis can offer guidance and motivation to those of us who do coaching and work in particular with men and women in the professions (thereby honoring the theme of this Future of Coaching issue).

The first point and one that resides at the core of Ridley’s analysis is the important role played by collective learning in the evolution of human beings. We will next turn to the theme of specialization (which Ridley suggests is fundamental in the creation of human societies). We conclude with the importance that Ridley places on the processes of appreciation (a perspective that we think is critical in the field of professional coaching). Each of these key points offers us the opportunity to be rationally optimistic when facing a postmodern world of turbulence, inconsistency and unpredictability.

The Collective Brain

Ridley proposes right off the bat that successful human evolution is a story of collaboration (not competition):

It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species. It was not something that happened within a brain. It was something that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon.

Throughout the book, Ridley refers to the “collective brain.” (pg. 38) He suggests that human beings would never have evolved so quickly if this evolution was dependent only on the physical properties of the human brain. A similar case is being made by David Christian in his extraordinary effort to produce “big history” (Christian, 2011). He proposes that the accelerated process of human evolution centers on the ability (and desire) of human beings to collaboratively learn and to accumulate and pass on this learning to the next generation. While our nearest evolutionary relatives (the primates) tend to replicate the same basic routines from generation to generation, humans learn, accumulate and invent.

This accelerated evolution occurs not through genetic modifications, but instead through modifications in human cultures. This “new” form of evolution is often referred to as “micro-evolutionary theory.” Cultural integration and collective learning and education produce inventions. As Ridley suggests, diverse ideas need to be brought together: “If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others [as occurs with primates], it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.” (pg. 6) Meeting and mating needs to occur in a specific community context (and increasingly in multiple, cross-cultural communities). In this regard, Ridley is echoing the perspective on innovation that is offered by Johansson in The Medici Effect. Communities such as Venice during the Renaissance and Paris in the 1920s become the crucibles of profound and diverse innovations–there is abundant “meeting and mating” among a highly diverse community of interacting men and women.

Ridley’s focus on collaborative learning and interactive diversity provides us, as coaches, with a rationale for serving as ideational provocateurs and networkers – as coaches we can bring together different perspectives and disciplines when working with our clients. It is particularly important for the coaches of professionals to help their clients become “interdisciplinary professionals” and to assist them in getting out of or (better yet) avoiding the disciplinary silos and rigid mind-sets that are all to common in the socialization and stabilizations of professional practices.

Some of the most rewarding coaching experiences have occured for the two authors during their years as practice management consultants and business coaches for dentists. These are small businessmen and businesswomen who have no golden parachutes, no employment contracts protecting them, no administrative executive team on whom to blame business failures. As people in the United States are inclined to say, the “buck” truly does stop here.

In settings, you work directly with the CEO of these entrepreneurial businesses. You often see immediate implementation and an impact throughout the organization – no bureaucratic mazes to wander through, no complex office politics to muddy the waters. And yet, there are diverse, interesting issues about which you coach your professional colleague. At times you may be a performance coach, at other times a life coach helping a dentist decide if she should change careers. At other times you do classic executive coaching, working with a person wrestling with strategic decisions for his dental practice that does $2 million USD annually. For us, it has been working with the best of both worlds …. that of a small entrepreneur and a corporate CEO.

A Blend of Coaching with Consulting

Coaching dentists typically seems to be most successful when there is a strong base of sound business practices operating in their organizations. When they have experienced profitable months, lower turnover, increased new business, or lowered stress, they have increased interest in classic coaching activities. One is reminded of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Until business survival and safety are taken care of, businessmen and businesswomen have a difficult time dealing with social and self-actualization issues. Practice management consulting gives us skills and tools to address basic business issues and gives us a common language to cut through procrastination and ignite change.

Many times a dentist will approach us for practice management consulting asking us to ‘change’ their team. Typical issues that the dentist asks us to address are: poor team interrelations, inferior verbal skills, team members not meeting the dentist’s expectations, etc. When we begin peeling the layers and really assess the situation, many times we find it is less about people issues then about the systems not working well and a lack of Leadership. However, peeling the layers to find out the true nature of the situation is delicate. It is important to do this while not compromising the trust and relationship with the dentist. We can appreciate the frustrations and concerns a dentist has trying to manage a business, given that the two of us and our husbands own several small businesses, We can help.

]]>https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/health-care-sector/practice-management-and-coaching-2/feed/08281The Transformative Shift in Healthcare Compels Coachinghttps://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/health-care-sector/the-transformative-shift-in-healthcare-compels-coaching/
https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/case-studies/health-care-sector/the-transformative-shift-in-healthcare-compels-coaching/#respondTue, 14 Apr 2015 19:19:12 +0000http://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/?p=8266“I hope you have good disability insurance my friend,” although I did not know it at the time, these were the words in 1998 that began my coaching career.

As the founding partner of a busy multi-office multi-surgeon practice, I was running all the time. Running to see the next patient in the office, or one of the three hospitals emergency rooms I covered. Running to deal with the next employee dilemma, equipment malfunction, patient complaint and the many business decisions and family obligations. No matter how early I set my alarm to awaken in the morning, I was always behind.

The practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery was less hectic when I first started practicing in 1980. However, once managed care became the pervasive delivery model for healthcare in the 1990s, everything dramatically changed. I treated more patients, spent less time with each patient, worked longer hours, and added more staff to deal with the administrative complexities of reimbursement.